Is This One Of Tetsuya Nomura's Unannounced Games?

Siliconera: In addition to Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Final Fantasy Agito XIII, Tetsuya Nomura has some top secret projects in the works. That's what he told Famitsu and Siliconera may have a glimpse at one of them.

Square Enix filed a patent application with Tetsuya Nomura as the inventor for a character switching battle system. The patent describes a RPG/action RPG (it mentions both terms) where a player character can switch and control a temporary character during combat. When you jump into the shoes of another character you get his/her/its stats and special abilities. Once time runs out, you automatically switch back to the main character and inherit the temporary character's abilities.

Is it necessary to patent such game mechanics? It just looks like something similar to Jericho's. It's not like if many games could use this system, I don't see how it's worth a patent. Or maybe I'm out of my shoes and publishers commonly patent their gameplay mechanics.